The difference between average programmers and excellent developers is not a matter of knowing the latest language or buzzword-laden technique. Rather, it can boil down to something as simple as not making the same mistakes over and over again. Fortunately, there's a powerful tool that any developer can use to help learn from the past: the project postmortem.

There's no shortage of checklists out there offering guidance on conducting your project postmortem. My advice is a bit more sanguine: I don't think it matters how you conduct the postmortem, as long as you do it. Most shops are far too busy rushing ahead to the next project to spend any time thinking about how they could improve and refine their software development process. And then they wonder why their new project suffers from all the same problems as their previous project.

The goal of a postmortem is to draw meaningful conclusions to help you learn from your past successes and failures. Despite its grim-sounding name, a postmortem can be an extremely productive method of improving your development practices.

Geoff Keighley's Behind the Games series, while not quite postmortems, are in the same vein. The early entries in the series are amazing pieces of investigative reporting on some of the most notorious software development projects in the game industry. Here are a few of my favorites: